


A Braided Horseman's Tale

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, GFY, Other, this was an excuse to write headcanons as stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-31
Updated: 2018-12-31
Packaged: 2019-10-01 04:15:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17237231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: Four seasons, four Horsemen, four points in their lives.





	A Braided Horseman's Tale

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Lferion for sanity-checking and cheerleading!
> 
> This is written as four sets of four drabbles, with no names in the stories themselves because of the closeness of the third-person POV.

**Spring**

_Caspian_

He is surrounded by drums and chanting, smoke and dancing. Always warm and fed and held. His mother tells him stories, whispering in his ear as he drowses in her arms. Aunt sings to him of their great mother, the goddess who gives them life and takes it away. Sister dances him around the fire and tells him he's special. No one tells him why, and he doesn't care. He is warm and fed and held and loved. Mother and Aunt and Sister, and all the others who bring them food and drink and ask only a story in return.

_Kronos_

He rides through a meadow full of flowers, the wind still sharp with the last clinging bits of winter, staying with the herd of horses. There are new foals that need to be guarded closely against the cold and against others on the great steppe who might take them. It is a duty that all the youth of the clan must take up, trading watches until the foals are marked and trained to saddle - and that, too, is a task put in the hands of the same who watch them. It is the part he has anticipated since last spring.

_Methos_

Staring up at the sky, he knows he will not return to his family. He cannot feel his legs, and no one else is foolish enough to dare the narrow path he had thought he could traverse. Ice melt and cleaving rock have sent him hurtling to his death instead, and one slower than he would have hoped. At least his beloveds won't have to see his broken body. They will mourn, and they will wail, but they will live with only the best memories. The best stories to tell to the children about their foolish wanderer of a father.

_Silas_

All he wanted was the easy prey the other was riding. He hasn't eaten in days, and there's none of the plants his papa would gather that are edible yet. Fish are hard, and wolf-kill or bear-kill sometimes means he dies and then he's hungry again. The other is making noises that he cannot understand, and holding something strange and bright and sharp as a wolf's teeth or a bear's claws. All he wants is to eat, and this is not as easy as it should have been. He doesn't want to die again because he couldn't eat.

* * *

**Summer**

_Silas_

His papa laughs, lifting him up and up, so high above the ground, even above his head. Like a bird through the air. He shrieks, waving his hands, and when his papa puts him down, makes grabby hands at him. Again. He wants to be up where the birds are. His mama picks him up instead, and they wrap him up. Wrap him up and tie him to his papa's back. He can be up with the birds, and go with his papa into the woods! It is the best day, and he wraps his arms around his papa happily.

_Caspian_

He is the Beloved, painted and praised and kept from the sun. Laughing as he dances with Sister around the fire under the stars. Letting Mother come with her needle to etch the dragon on his scalp, telling all the world he is the Beloved. Aunt carves bones that hang around his neck, marking his bond with the great mother. And with the dawn, he returns to the tent, and Sister comes with him. Teaches him something new, with hands and body. It makes him gasp and pant, closing his eyes against a feeling he doesn't know how to name.

_Kronos_

He throws himself from his dying horse at the raider who is one of many - too many - swarming through the tents. All he can do is fight and hope his wife has escaped. That his son will live to avenge his father's death when he is more than an infant. The raider dies under his spear, and he turns to the next. Again and again, until one gets lucky, and he can't even scream with the knife blade seeking past ribs for his heart. All he can do is take the one who has killed him with him into death.

_Methos_

She's shorter than he is, shorter than his wife had been. Shorter even than anyone he's ever met who isn't a child. Older, too, than he has ever been before he died. He calls her grandmother, and she calls him something in a language he doesn't know that he decides must be grandson. Later he will learn what it means, but it will never stop meaning grandson to him. He learns how to make a spear from her, and how to hunt the local beasts. He trades her stories of his long journey and the family he lost long ago.

* * *

**Autumn**

_Methos_

He is warm, wrapped up and leaning against his mama's back as the family walks. They're going where the stone is, where it stays warm. The grass goes away and it gets cold. He doesn't like the cold. It feels funny on his face. But it won't be cold in the place of stone. Stone and pictures. His mama likes to help him paint pictures on the walls of the stone. Tells him stories about all the pictures from before. He likes the ones about the great fuzzy beasts mama says lived with them where the grass drowned long ago.

_Silas_

He's hungry all the time, even though mother showed him how to find food. How to get honey out of trees and fish out of the stream and grubs out of logs. When to eat berries and when the fish are plentiful and when to climb out of the trees to where the rocks hide fluttery treats. He knows how to find a den when the snow comes so he can hide in the winter, but he doesn't sleep like she does, and no matter how much he eats now, he will not have enough to get through the winter.

_Caspian_

He's dressed in the finest clothes to eat at the finest feast. Maybe it's so because he is eating in the sun, the last light before it falls below the sky and night rises in its place. It's strange, though, and he wants to worry, even though Mother is smiling, and everyone is smiling around him. Not Sister, though. Sister isn't here. Sister wouldn't come. Drums begin, familiar song making him smile as the fire is kindled, and dancing begins. Chanting, too, and he watches. Until he feels a cool hand on his forehead, and a blade over his throat.

_Kronos_

He finds his wife near the ruins of their tent, curled around their son. All he can do is keen, holding their bodies as he wonders what god he has angered that he lives again while they do not. While all his world is ashes and blood. How long he's there before someone tells him to get up and leave the mortal bodies, he doesn't know. He does know the stranger - one of the raiders, he thinks - dies again and again before he finds a way to keep him so. It is not revenge enough, but it is a beginning.

* * *

**Winter**

_Kronos_

He likes traveling the best, bundled up so he does not get too cold, and riding the sleds with their tents and all they own. Running alongside the sled when they're going slow enough, and he's tired of sitting. Snuggling between his father and his mother, wrapped in furs and leathers, with everyone else crowded close to sleep for a few hours before they go on again. Helping with the horses and the dogs when they set up a new camp where the snow is thinner, and the horses can graze. It is the best part of everything he knows.

_Methos_

He meets the man first, when he wanders away from the paths his family has walked for generations, and goes to a different valley for the winter. The man is pretty and soft and has never walked so far as another valley in his life. The man makes him happy, and shows him new pleasures that he had not dreamed before. They meet the woman when they leave the man's valley, and go toward the sun. She is pretty, darker than them both, and laughs as they court her, and comes back with them to the valley when they ask.

_Silas_

The wolves come back. They sometimes do, especially when the snow has been deep and hunting hard. Only he's too hungry to just walk away, like he sometimes will. This is his food, he has defended it from ravens and foxes, and it has kept him from starving. But he cannot fight. He cannot win against a pack of wolves, even hungry and lean as these are. It has been too long a winter for him, longer than it has for them. He can feel their teeth at his leg, his belly, his throat, and then he can feel nothing.

_Caspian_

The stranger makes his head feel all buzzy like he's drunk too much of Mother's wine, and he doesn't know why. He doesn't know why the stranger babbles at him in a tongue he doesn't recognize, he does not understand why the stranger even bothers to put a knife in his heart. It will not kill him. He is Beloved. Even if he has been left behind, he is Beloved, and he will not die. It is a long time before he finds out the stranger cannot die, either, and it is not because the Great Mother made him so.


End file.
